95 Years of Collecting at the Heard Museum

Ann Marshall, Director of Research

If you had visited the Heard Museum on its opening day, December 26, 1929, you would have seen exhibits in 11 galleries, presenting nearly all of the international collection of Indigenous art that Dwight and Maie Heard had developed through their travels to Africa, Hawai’i, Mexico, the Pacific and the western United States. The Heards’ daughter-in-law, Winifred Heard, recalled her first visit to the Heard home in 1921. She saw room after room filled with their collection and urged the Heards to create a museum where they could share the art with the community. Fortunately, the Heards were persuaded to undertake the project. Viewed in context, presenting Indigenous art of the world was something no other museum in the state was doing.

Having decided to build a museum, the Heards began augmenting their personal collection. By at least 1927, Herb BraMé and Allie Walling BraMé of the Arizona Curio Company were working on commission, purchasing Indigenous art of the western United States. Allie would become the museum’s first curator. The Heards also purchased from local American Indian art stores and major dealers, including the Fred Harvey Company. It is important to recognize that their collecting approach was measured and small-scale, quite different from that of large Eastern museums, which had expeditions in the field collecting on a massive scale.

With the museum building completed in 1928, exhibit installation began. When Dwight Heard suffered a fatal heart attack on March 14, 1929, it was left to Maie to make the museum a reality. Maie shaped the collection’s growth. Relying on the guidance of curator Allie BraMé, she also sought advice from a distinguished unofficial advisory group. The group included Southwestern archaeologist Dr. Emil Haury of the Arizona State Museum, Tucson; Harold Colton, founder of the Museum of Northern Arizona, Flagstaff; Frederick Webb Hodge, director of the Southwest Museum, Los Angeles; Frederic H. Douglas, curator of Native arts at the Denver Art Museum; and Rene d’Harnoncourt of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Maria and Julian Martinez (P’o Woe-geh Ówîngeh, 1887-1980 and 1879-1943), vase, c. 1935. Clay, slip, 19 x 14 inches. NA-SW-Si-A10-2.

Maie’s interest in growing the collection focused on cultural arts rather than painting and sculpture. Her correspondence regarding acquisitions reflects an emphasis on aesthetic and technical quality. Throughout her 22 years of guiding the museum, Maie’s conservative approach to quality over quantity did not waver. She did not want to add an artwork that wouldn’t be exhibited. Also, regard for “authentic” did not blind her to “contemporary.” Her acquisition of a superb Maria and Julian Martinez blackware vase, a departure from earlier San Ildefonso polychromes, was an example of collecting and appreciating change in cultural art. At the time of Maie’s death in 1951, the museum collection was a slightly expanded version of the Heards’ personal collection. That changed dramatically in the 1960s and 1970s with the gift of major collections.

Foundational Collections
Perhaps the museum’s best-known collection was donated in 1964 by Senator Barry M. Goldwater. His collection of more than 430 Hopi katsina carvings included carvings created in the late 1800s. The most recent were 50 carvings that Goldwater had commissioned from Oswald White Bear Fredericks in an effort to include as many representations of the Katsinam as possible.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the museum received collections that were critical to expanding the stories that exhibitions could tell. The Fred Harvey Fine Arts Collection, given in 1978 by the heirs of travel entrepreneur Fred Harvey, may be the most impactful gift received by the museum to date. The gift of more than 4,000 artworks of unsurpassed quality extended the Heard’s original, primarily 20th-century collection back to the mid-19th century. The gift included spectacular examples of textiles, jewelry, katsina dolls, ceramics, and beadwork by artists of the western United States.

Ending Anonymity
A review of the museum’s collection in the 1950s would have found that very few works were associated with the artist’s name, apart from pottery, which increasingly was signed. Two important collections of the 1960s and 1970s added art that changed those circumstances. In 1975, Charles Garret Wallace, longtime trader at Pueblo of Zuni and on the Navajo Nation, donated 500 pieces of jewelry with information on 95% of the collection, included artists’ names, dates of creation within 10 years, and identification of stones. His gift meant that the museum had the best-documented collection of Zuni and Navajo jewelry in a public collection at that time.

Hastíín Klah (Diné 1867–1937). Shooting Chant sandpainting textile, 1925. Handspun wool, aniline dye, 96 x 96. Gift of Read Mullan

Between 1961 and 1978, Heard Museum trustee Read Mullan gave 87 Diné textiles by named artists, many of whom had won awards in juried competitions. The majority of Mullan’s collection spanned the period from 1950 to 1970, the high point of regionalism, when textiles were being appreciated as cultural art rather than floor coverings. Mullan also donated sandpainting weavings by Hastíín Klah (1867-1937), which are the earliest works done by this master weaver.

Collecting Contemporary Fine Art
It was not until the 1960s that the museum began to address the original collection’s lack of painting and sculpture. A series of contemporary solo artist sales shows in the 1960s was followed, beginning in 1973, by invitational sculpture and painting exhibitions that were also sales shows. Invitationals included artists from across the United States and Canada. Over the years, art purchased at these exhibitions has been given to the museum collection. These gifts and exhibitions started the museum on a distinctive collecting path, making it a leader in its field and becoming institutionally defining.

Valuing Innovation and Heritage
Appreciation of innovation in art, regardless of the medium, is a continuing collecting value moving forward from Maie Heard’s time. It is based on the celebration of living, changing cultures and valuing creativity in all its forms. Many of the knowledgeable collectors who have given to the museum from those mid-century decades to the present have built their collections through meeting artists at events, such as the Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair & Market. The Heard Museum Shop has, since its founding in 1958, been a source for innovative artworks, sought by collectors, who ultimately donated them to the museum. The collectors have over the years developed expert knowledge of technical and aesthetic aspects of the art and personal friendships with artists whose careers they have followed. Those gifts have been essential to the museum’s ability to exhibit the latest and best of artistic innovation. Beyond gifts of collections, the opportunity to purchase is extremely important. While collections may take decades to build, the gift of purchase funds has made it possible for the Heard to purchase art at the cutting edge. As contemporary artists have expanded areas of interest, including fashion and photography, the museum has been fortunate to receive gifts and the means to purchase from artists such as Will Wilson, Cara Romero, Meryl McMaster and Tanya Lukin Linklater.

Valuing innovation in the museum’s collecting is complemented by recognizing the Indigenous artistic heritage that inspires many contemporary artists. The museum continues to welcome into the collection gifts of cultural art from the 19th and early 20th centuries that influenced the wider art world. The importance of this heritage has been most recently explored through Virginia G. Piper Grand Gallery exhibitions.

Looking into the future, it is clear that while much has changed since the Heard Museum’s opening day in 1929, celebrating Indigenous artists’ voices and visions through exhibiting the museum’s impressive collection has not changed. Maie Heard would be pleased.